‘A close eye’: GOP ramps up voter scrutiny

On a Monday in midMarch, the Wisconsin Republican Party gathered about 50 conservative activists on a Zoom call to train them in how to become poll workers, helping oversee and monitor the casting and counting of votes.

Heavily Democratic areas of the battleground state were a key focus. “Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee — that type,” Mike Hoffman, the state party’s election integrity director, said as he ticked off places being targeted.

“We’re keeping a close eye on you,” he recounted telling one city clerk, according to audio recordings of the party’s training sessions obtained by The New York Times.

The Wisconsin training sessions are a small part of an expansive operation announced Friday by former President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, which plan to dispatch more than 100,000 volunteers and lawyers to monitor and potentially challenge the electoral process in each battleground state. They will focus on every aspect of voting, including mail ballots, voting machines and post-Election Day recounts and audits.

The effort is rooted in Trump’s persistent false claims that Democrats cheated to win the 2020 election. His allies have helped turn that belief into Republican doctrine despite the overwhelming conclusion by Democratic and GOP election officials, as well as federal and state judges, that no evidence of widespread fraud exists.

The RNC had a similar program during the 2022 midterms, but this year’s operation is larger and signals the party’s direction under new leaders. They have been told to make so-called election integrity central to the party’s ground game and to be far more aggressive in challenging both election procedures and results.

Trump has repeatedly urged his supporters and allies to “guard the vote” in November. And his sights appear to be set on heavily Democratic, and often heavily Black, cities in battleground states that he lost in 2020. He and his supporters raised baseless concerns about widespread election fraud in these places as they worked to overturn that year’s contest.

Since his defeat, Trump has privately groused that his legal team was unprepared to challenge the results. His team and its allies lost all but one of more than 60 lawsuits they brought, with their lawyers unable to provide valid evidence of widespread fraud that had changed the election results, as they claimed.

The new plan for a large network of lawyers is a fresh sign that if Trump loses in November, he is likely to challenge the results again. The RNC statement Friday said the operation would run “from the first day of early voting through Election Day — and afterward if necessary.”